You can’t possibly think of sending someone else.” Tamsyn had been reminding him of the upcoming wine awards ceremony for days now and he’d been ignoring each reminder deliberately. He knew he had an amazing team but he also hated to leave the property at this stage of the winemaking process. The reserve chardonnay was about to head into its secondary fermentation and bulk aging in oak barrels, while the Shiraz was already into its malolactic fermentation stage. Sure, he could delegate a lot of the testing that needed to take place at this point—it was how he’d been trained by his father and how his father had been trained before him, after all. If you didn’t share and, in some cases, relinquish responsibility, no one learned anything of real value along the way. The family often teased him about the stranglehold he kept on operations and his pedantic methods, but they worked. After all, wasn’t that why The Masters was up for this most recent award in the first place?
